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Pope Emeritus Benedict emerges and defends his abuse record to an atheist

Vatican Two Popes_Thor.jpg

In this Saturday, March 23, 2013 photo provided by the Vatican paper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Francis, left, meets Pope emeritus Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo Saturday, March 23, 2013. Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has emerged from his self-imposed silence inside the Vatican to publish a lengthy letter to one of Italy's most well-known atheists. In it, he defends his record on handling sexually abusive priests and discusses everything from evolution to theology to the figure of Jesus Christ. Excerpts of the letter were published Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2013 by La Repubblica, the same newspaper which just two weeks ago published a similar letter from Pope Francis to its own atheist publisher. The letters indicate the two men in white, who live across the Vatican gardens from one another, are pursuing a collaborative campaign of sorts to engage non-believers. (AP Photo/Osservatore Romano, Files)

VATICAN CITY (AP) --
Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has emerged from his self-imposed silence
inside the Vatican walls to publish a lengthy letter to one of Italy's
most well-known atheists. In it, he denies having covered up for
sexually abusive priests and discusses everything from evolution to the
figure of Jesus Christ.

Excerpts of the letter were published
Tuesday by La Repubblica, the same newspaper which just two weeks ago
published a similar letter from Pope Francis to its own atheist
publisher.

The letters indicate that the two men in white -- who
live across the Vatican gardens from one another -- are pursuing an
active campaign to engage non-believers. It's a melding of papacies past
and present that has no precedent and signals that the popes -- while
very different in style, personality and priorities -- are of the same
mind on many issues and might even be collaborating on them.

Benedict
wrote the letter to Piergiorgio Odifreddi, an Italian atheist and
mathematician who in 2011 wrote a book "Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You."
The book was Odifreddi's reaction to Benedict's classic "Introduction to
Christianity," perhaps his best-known work.

In his book,
Odifreddi posed a series of polemical arguments about the Catholic
faith, including the church's sex abuse scandal. The former Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger headed the Vatican office responsible for abuse cases,
and was pope when scandal erupted in 2010, with thousands of people
coming forward in Europe, Latin America and beyond saying they had been
molested by priests while the Vatican turned a blind eye.

In his letter, Benedict denies personal responsibility, saying: "I never tried to cover these things up."

"That
the power of evil penetrated so far into the interior world of the
faith is a suffering that we must bear, but at the same time we must do
everything to prevent it from repeating," he wrote, according to
Repubblica.

While Vatican officials have long insisted that
Benedict did more than anyone in the church to confront the problem of
abusive clergy, Benedict's letter marked the first time he himself had
publicly denied personal responsibility for the scandal.

Benedict
became the first pope in 600 years to resign when he retired Feb. 28,
setting the stage for the election of Francis two weeks later. Benedict
said at the time that he would spend his final years "hidden from the
world," living in a converted monastery tucked behind St. Peter's
Basilica, reading and praying.

Benedict's decision to cloister
himself was in part due to his own shy, bookish nature, but also to make
clear that he was no longer pope and that his successor was in charge.

Fear
of schism in the church had prevented popes for centuries from stepping
down, and Benedict's resignation immediately raised some
not-insignificant questions: How would the Catholic Church deal with the
novel situation of having one reigning and one retired pope living
side-by-side, each of them called "pope," each of them wearing papal
white and even sharing the same aide in Monsignor Georg Gaenswein?

Benedict
has been seen only a handful of times since his retirement, and only
once with Francis at an official Vatican ceremony in July. A prolific
writer, he has published nothing since retiring -- except for the
encyclical "The Light of Faith" which was signed by Francis but was
actually written almost entirely by Benedict.

All of which made
Repubblica's publication of his letter all the more remarkable, since it
came out of the blue and just two weeks after a letter on almost the
exact same subject was penned by Francis on the same pages.

The
Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was pure
coincidence that the two men had written two well-known Italian atheists
on the same subject in as many weeks. Francis' letter used a language
that is much closer to Benedict's style -- but Lombardi denied the two
had collaborated on it.

In
Benedict's letter, he takes Odifreddi to task for what he said was the
"aggressiveness" of his book, and responds to many of the arguments
raised with piqued criticism himself.

"What you say about the
figure of Jesus isn't worthy of your scientific standing," wrote
Benedict, who authored a highly praised, three-volume work on the Jesus
Christ during his pontificate.

He similarly criticizes Odifreddi's
"religion of mathematics" as "empty" since it doesn't even consider
three fundamental themes for humanity: freedom, love and evil.

On
evolution, he wrote: "If you want to substitute God with Nature, the
question remains: What does this Nature consist of? Nowhere do you
define it and it appears rather like an irrational divinity that doesn't
explain anything."

Odifreddi, for his part, wrote in an
accompanying piece Tuesday that he was stunned to have received the
letter, though he said he wrote the book precisely in hopes Benedict
might read it. He said he sought, and obtained, Benedict's permission to
publish the letter.

He said he planned to re-issue his book with
Benedict's letter included: "an unprecedented dialogue between a
theologian pope and an atheist mathematician, divided in most everything
but drawn together by at least one objective: the search for Truth."